![Snapchatters]()
When 671 people in banana suits packed into a concert venue in Austin, Texas, at this year’s SXSW technology festival, it broke the world record for most people dressed as fruit in one location.
"And we're breaking the record for most Snapchatter’s at one event!" 26-year-old Cyrene Quiamco cheered into her smartphone camera, as a group of banana-clad social-media stars hooted and bounced behind her.
The clip, of course, showed up in @CyreneQ’s Snapchat Story as she took her followers behind the scenes of the bash, which tripled as a startup launch party, corporate publicity stunt, and Quiamco’s birthday celebration.
Even hundreds of miles from her friends and family in Arkansas, she felt surrounded by some of her closest allies and confidantes.
“The Snapchat community is incredibly tight,” she tells Business Insider. “People drove 22 hours to be there. We’re so close because we grew from each other.”
They're also close because there are so few of them: Quiamco is part of an elite handful of Snapchatters who make their living on the disappearing photo service.
Quitting the day job
Once dismissed as a sexting app, Snapchat has swelled into a messaging and digital-video powerhouse valued at $16 billion. The app's young audiences and its opt-in, in-the-moment experiences has major brands, such as Burger King and Walmart, partnering with creators like Quiamco.
Snapchat stars get paid to temporarily take over a brand's official account on the app, or to create original programming and interactive campaigns, which the brands sponsor.
Quiamco makes between $10,000 and $30,000 a project on average and booked an income in the low six-figures last year, even though she only focused on Snapchat part-time. That potential convinced her to quit her 9-to-5 gig as a graphic designer for Verizon in October.
When she’s not collaborating (or having banana-suited dance parties) with other Snapchatters in real life, she stays connected to a core community through a secret Facebook Group where fellow Snapchat stars swap tips, advice, and the occasional gripe.
One topic that riled many of the group’s roughly 30 members was a recent interview with the CEO of social-media events company DigiTour who said on stage that "there are no Snapchat stars." Sure, there are the DJ Khaleds and Kylie Jenners — already famous people who amassed enormous followings — but she said that digital celebrities won't come from the app.
![Snapchat Stars]()
Unsurprisingly, the group of artists and storytellers who had built their own huge followings on the social network bristled at the statement, and Quiamco quickly fired off a response on her own Snapchat-centric website.
Not easy to go viral
But even in that post she concedes that Snapchat's platform really does make it nearly impossible to grow an organic audience. With no user suggestion page, no content-discovery portal outside of Snapchat's Discover hub for publishers, and no easy way to share Snaps, users like CyreneQ can’t exactly go "viral" in the typical sense.
Snapchat itself makes money by inserting ads into media brand's Discover stories, letting brands sponsor "Live" feeds, and charging for custom geofilters or $750,000-a-pop branded Lenses. Snapchat sees itself as a messaging tool between friends combined with a storytelling platform, but there’s none of the influencer-company alliance that you see on YouTube or Vine because it’s not relying on their content to bring in ad dollars.
Even Snapchat’s biggest native stars haven’t had anything beyond the most cursory official contact with the company, if that.
But despite the downsides, the high barrier to discoverability is also part of what makes people like Quiacamo so valuable to brands. Getting big on Snapchat requires creativity and authenticity and users essentially build their followings by word of mouth. So those audiences are often rabidly dedicated, staying engaged through a star’s sponsored content and willing to follow as they ping across corporate accounts.
And because it's really hard to get popular, those who have gotten their names out there have become a kind of exclusive squad, consisting of less than a dozen native creators who can actually make a living from the app.
As the service swells into a behemoth, we talked to a handful of top Snapchat creators who are actually getting hefty payouts to ask them how they got started and what the life of a full-time Snapchat star is really like:
SEE ALSO: Facebook won a bidding war against 2 other companies for a hot new app that could help it fend off Snapchat
Christine Mi assumed she'd use her economics degree from Yale to go into finance or consulting. Instead, she's a Snapchat artist.
![]()
Mi first started creating elaborate Snapchat doodles as a way to procrastinate on her homework and amuse her friends. But a few months after some artwork she'd posted on Tumblr went viral in March 2014, an agency reached out and asked her if she'd be interested in working with brands.
By the beginning of her senior year in college, she had already started to see the cash flowing in, but still applied to a bunch of "traditional jobs," sealing an offer at a respected consulting firm in New York City. But she turned it down to focus on Snapchat full-time when she graduated last fall.
"It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Mi tells Business Insider. "I wasn't sure how much of a fad this would be — whether it would be relevant for about two years and then just go away — so I really didn't want to regret not riding this wave as it was happening."
So *is* it going away?
![]()
Not if you ask one of the handful of agencies and networks now touting a specialty in Snapchat marketing, including Giant Spoon, Naritiv, or VaynerMedia.
Nick Cicero, the CEO of creator-network company Delmondo, which specializes in Snapchat analytics, says that he’s seen an incredible increase in advertiser interest, with his startup partnering with more than a dozen new major brands in the last month, including Spotify, AT&T, and Unicef.
“We’re in the top of the first inning with Snapchat,” he says. “We haven’t even gotten into the big wave of influencer campaigns yet.”
As for Mi, she says that in the last year she's made an income in the low-six figures — "definitely more than I would have if I had taken the consulting offer" — through projects with the likes of Bloomingdales, Coca-Cola, and DreamWorks.
![]()
She's had one-day gigs that earn a bit over $10,000, but that's juxtaposed with her work for VH1, for example, which spanned an entire season of their TV show "Scream Queens." (She took over their account to post each time it aired.)
Above is a set of Snapchat geofilters that Mi designed for the DreamWorks movie "Kung Fu Panda 3."
She and other Snapchat stars say that the metrics that brands care about are number of views, how far viewers get in their Stories, and the number of screenshots.
Where to find her: @Miologie
See the rest of the story at Business Insider![]()
She also posted a photo to Instagram to announce the brand's launch, which, according to its 
But while making “Flaked,” he got the urge to drink again.
Kanye West's latest album, "The Life of Pablo," is now available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music.
Unsurprisingly, the group of artists and storytellers who had built their own huge followings on the social network bristled at the statement, and Quiamco quickly fired off a response on her own 
